> But perhaps more importantly, I think that what Intel is buying is what was sorely lacking them : people and a methodology of working with external customers. From all I've heard over the years, Intel's process and design teams are so insular and out of touch with the rest of the industry's practices that they had a terrible time just working with customers.

This is not a problem at all. If they wanted to go this direction it's as simple as dumbing down, cheapening their process a bit, and giving free reign to make decisions on what they will be fabbing to technically competent salespeople.

With Intel's resources they could've even developed such commodity process separately to their own process, and ran them in parallel.

They had almost a whole decade to do that. It's just they simply didn't.